Embodiment, Identity and History in The Fin-de-siËcle Boy Love Reader (1996)

Taiwanese writer Wu Jiwen is one of a handful of contemporary Chinese-language writers who have revisited premodern Chinese literature on same-sex union and desire and tried to appropriate it for present-day purposes. In The Fin-de-siËcle Boy Love Reader (1996), Wu rewrites Chen Senís mid-nineteenth-century novel, A Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers (first printed 1849). Wu chooses to narrate the story from the perspective of a teenage boy, whose existence is theoretically embedded in Chenís original text but is completely identitiless. I argue that Wuís decision to abandon the third-person omniscient perspective common in late imperial Chinese novels to refocus on and imaginatively reconstruct the voice and subjectivity of an underling bespeaks a contemporary need to see the possibility of voluntary, egalitarian same-sex unions in some premodern sexual relationships notoriously shot through with class inequalities and age and gender hierarchies. Is Wuís project so overdetermined by late-twentieth-century political concerns as to lose interest as a historical and hermeneutic effort? Or has it surprisingly brought to light a much neglected dimension of traditional Chinese man-boy love? This paper will carefully read Boy Love Reader against its urtext, to interpret their contrasting configurations of embodiment, identity and history.